Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thunderbird’s Future Home

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 126 posts

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#61

Post by jcranmer »

mrweasel wrote: post #17
Vinnl wrote: post #5

tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC). Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.

I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox

The short answer: not really.

About a decade ago, Mozilla decided that Thunderbird should be making a bigger effort to pay for its own funding. The two business opportunities that were implemented were paid email accounts (driven by a survey that found that a substantial portion of new users expected they were getting an email address when they downloaded Thunderbird), and paid support for the large-attachment uploads. Some of the companies involved have since withdrawn the contracts.

In any case, the money being involved (I'm told) isn't stellar--on the order of $10s of K per annum in total.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#62

Post by cookiecaper »

tangue wrote: post #8
frik wrote: post #6

A Bright Future The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies Mozilla dumps…

The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".

There comes a time where good sense means you have to kiss these old projects goodbye. It makes sense for Thunderbird to try to move to a platform that users actually want to use. Thunderbird is in the state it's in because very few people still value a "fat" mail client.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#63

Post by drzaiusapelord »

elipsey wrote: post #35

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

Students don't have office jobs. Get a real job and suddenly things like Outlook or TB make a lot of sense. Webmail is ultimately overly limiting compared to a native client for many common work-related use cases. Not to mention, your phone email app is an email client.

I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook running the front end for a postfix/dovecot server just for the convenience.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#64

Post by avian »

vog wrote: post #27
nickcw wrote: post #24

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job. I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent. I use lots of plu…

> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent. Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway. Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file: text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to…

Not the parent. One thing that prevents me from using text-only mail clients is that I have to read mail where in-line replies are distinguished from quoted content only by font color set in HTML. This means that I have to disable even Thunderbird's "Simple HTML" feature (which makes all text black).

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#65

Post by xaa »

Twirrim wrote: post #30
vog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent. Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway. Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file: text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to…

It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support. I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others)…

> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world

Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.

Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#66

Post by neuronexmachina »

pavement wrote: post #43
elipsey wrote: post #35

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy . (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#67

Post by Erik816 »

edpichler wrote: post #23

I like to read about these open source organizations apparently very well administrated. It's a very interesting business model to me.

I'm not sure this is a textbook example of open source leading to a well administrated organization. I realize these decisions are complex, but the people who work on Thunderbird have been talking about the inevitability of this move for years at this point. Those are years that a more nimble (and profit motivated) organization could have been spent actually moving to a new technology instead of endlessly debating what to do.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#69

Post by kiliankoe »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #66
pavement wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy . (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?

The comment above wasn't specifically about Thunderbird, but any native non-webmail client.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#70

Post by Twirrim »

xaa wrote: post #65
Twirrim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support. I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others)…

> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam. Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form. Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.
Post reply on HN